They may get there at Exeter City tomorrow: they may have to wait until Saturday, when they're at Halifax; but sooner or later, Aldershot Town will get the point they need to bring league football back to the Recreation Ground (unglamorous name: unglamorous place) for the first time in 16 years. These are stirring times for resurrected football clubs. In 2006, Accrington, Lancashire, regained the place it had lost in the league when Accrington Stanley folded without completing the season in 1962. Now it's the turn of the Town, which - like Accrington - is not a continuation, but a resurrection: a new club built on the ruins of one that collapsed.

To me, the one sad aspect of Town's almost conclusive win on Saturday was that their victims were Burton Albion. Until a calamitous run over the past few weeks there had seemed to be a fair chance that league football might return after more than a century to Burton-upon-Trent, a town that once had two clubs in the Football League, though the second, Burton United, disappeared in 1907. There is also, I gather, a mood of unwonted hope in Gateshead, where a team that represents the second attempt to resurrect a club that the league rejected in 1960 could well ascend to the Blue Square Conference North (two levels down from the league) next season.

In south-west London, AFC Wimbledon, successors to the club so indefensibly abducted to Milton Keynes in 2002, have given some dodgy performances lately, but they're sure of a place in the play-offs for a position in the Blue Square Conference South (also two rungs down from the league). And another protest team, FC United of Manchester, who since the American takeover at Old Trafford have regarded themselves as the real Man United, have a chance of promotion to the Unibond Premier, three stages down - along with the successors to Bradford Park Avenue, who went into liquidation in 1974.

"Whoever next?" one is tempted to ask. Will we see the return of Gainsborough Trinity (fell out of the league in 1912); Glossop North End (failed to resume in the league after the first world war); Thames, who played at Custom House in east London, but gave up in 1932 after only two seasons; or Middlesbrough Ironopolis (a name one would love to hear James Alexander Gordon wrapping his tongue round), who, elected in 1893, lasted for only one?

What's about to happen at Aldershot seems especially heartening in the light of the way they collapsed. "Shots: it's the end", the Aldershot News proclaimed as a new season started in August 1990. The club was nearly half a million in debt. But then a potential white knight appeared in the shape of a property developer called Spencer Trethewy: charming, personable, apparently well-connected and only 19. "This," said the News, under a picture of Spencer holding a team scarf, "is the young man who everybody down at the Recreation Ground would like to shake hands with." An immediate £100,000, a further £60,000 in six weeks' time and £40,000 more in a year, together with a bumper sponsorship from one of the companies owned by this teenage tycoon, would save the club.

The team, however, continued to flounder at the foot of division four. And three months later, the News of the World denounced young Trethewy as a fantasist and a fraud. He left the club's board, saying he'd soon be back, but he wasn't. In time, supporters who had once been so eager to shake his hand were keener to wring his neck. In 1994, he was jailed for two years for fraud, though the charges had nothing to do with his adventures in Aldershot. Meanwhile, the team kept losing, and was soon again drowning in debt: £92,000 to the Inland Revenue, £200,000 to the local council, players unpaid for months, over £1.2m owing in all. "It's all over for the Shots", the News reported on March 27 1992; and this time it was.

Yet theirs has not been the only relevant resurrection. The Non-League Paper, which monitors such matters, has tracked down Spencer Trethewy, now Spencer Day. He's back in football, as manager of Chertsey Town - a job he had little trouble in getting, as he now owns the club. True, they're a modest 11th in the Cherry Red Records Combined Counties League, five rungs below the league. But, not so very long ago, that's where you would have found Aldershot Town.